Wednesday, January 9, 2019 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, January 9, 2019 // The Statement 
5B

Annie Klus /Daily 
The Good News Accapella group performing.

I

t’s a Saturday night in mid-December, 
and despite the freezing temperatures 
and the impending tempest of finals, 
Angell Hall Auditorium A at the University 
of Michigan is packed. Students and families 
have crowded into the rows of cramped seats, 
and there’s a folding table along the back wall 
piled high with veggie trays, cookie platters 
and boxes of Entenmann’s Little Bites. The 
biannual Good News Christian a cappella 
concert is about to start.
The performance begins with a video, pro-
jected on the screen at the front of the room. 
In the video, Good News members do a vari-
ety of skits about the ordinary stresses of col-
lege life: an awkward date at Bubble Island, a 
looming exam, catching the flu at an inconve-
nient time. All this, they explain, is why they 
feel a bit unprepared for the concert — but the 
show must go on. The video ends with the 
Good News crew opening the doors of Audi-
torium A. As their on-screen counterparts 
enter, so do the flesh-and-blood members of 
the group. The lights turn back on, and the 
show begins. Whatever I expected from a 
performance by the University’s only Chris-
tian a cappella group, this wasn’t it.
A 

few weeks before the concert, I 
spoke to two Good News members 
at a tiny table in the South Univer-
sity Espresso Royale: LSA sophomore Maica 
Mori and Information graduate student Luke 
Thompson. Mori is in her second year with 
Good News, and Thompson is in his fifth 
(he’s been a member since his sophomore 
year of undergrad). Both Mori and Thomp-
son arrived at the University unsure about 
how they would integrate their faith into col-
lege life.
“I knew I wanted to be a part of a singing 
group,” Mori explained. “A capella seemed 
cool.”
When she stumbled upon Good News 
online, she was intrigued. “I felt really strong-
ly about Good News,” she said. “Joining it has 
been one of the best college decisions.”
“My sophomore year, I tried to get more 
engaged with the University,” Thompson 
said. “I thought I would try to embrace the 
faith I’d been brought up in and just see if that 
would help me get to know people and under-
stand my faith better.”
Singing has always been important to both 
Mori and Thompson, as both a part of wor-
ship and outside it. 
Thompson grew up Lutheran, and since 
coming to college, he’s tried out a few dif-

ferent churches in southeast Michigan. He 
recently settled on Zion Evangelical-Luther-
an Church of Detroit, a 600-seat neo-Gothic 
stone building located down the street from 
the historic Senate Theater.
Mori was raised Apostolic Pentecostal, a 
Christian sect with wildly different tradi-
tions than Lutheranism.
“I grew up going to a church that has a lot 
of bands, worship, music, open worship every 
Sunday,” Mori said. “So I’m used to collective 
singing Christian songs,”
“And I come from a bunch of stoic Ger-
mans,” Thompson joked.
Good News members were raised with 
all kinds of Christian denominations, which 
Mori and Thompson believe is part of the 
group’s strength.
“I grew up in maybe a kind of an older style 
of church,” Thompson said. “So seeing people 
who worship in a different way — people who 
have emotion as more prevalent in the way 
they worship — it sort of teaches me about 
how they understand things and I’m able to 
impart stuff I’ve learned in a more traditional 
setting.”
“You can come from a very specific 
denominational background, but then when 
you come to Good News, you can meet other 
Christians and see different worship styles 
and different ways that people live out their 
faith,” Mori added. “It really causes you to 
grow as a Christian.”
Mori explained the Apostolic Pentecostal 
traditions are much more emotive than those 
of the Lutheran services Thompson grew up 
attending.
“It’s the complete opposite side of the 
coin,” she explained. “It’s a newer (type of 
Christianity), a whole mixed bag of people. 
It’s very much big displays of worship. It’s 
completely different. I visited Luke’s church 
before and it’s the traditional cathedral thing 
— the priests came up and they did the goblet 
of wine.”
At her church, things are far less formal. 
“It’s very much open,” Mori said. Sometimes, 
she explained, people even dance during ser-
vices. “If some people show emotional dis-
plays, it’s completely acceptable. If people are 
crying, things like that.”
Though she began college unsure of how 
faith would fit into her new routines and 
rhythms, Mori explained the strength of 
other Good News members’ devotion has 
helped her realize that a life with God is the 
one she wants and needs.

I asked Mori if Good News has changed 
the way she thinks about religion.
“In more ways than I could talk about with 
our time,” she said. “It was really cool because 
coming into college I had this thing, like, I 
didn’t really want to go to church as much as 
I used to. My faith was really waning. I would 
talk to God sometimes and be like ‘God, to be 
honest, I might take a break from church, I’m 
not really sure about this.’”
After joining Good News, her initial uncer-
tainty evaporated. Mori said it is the specific 
blend of community, singing and faith that 
makes Good News such a good fit for her.
When I asked about the primary goal of 
the group, they explained the group doesn’t 
really have a single, defined aim.
“It’s kind of a fun question,” Thompson 
said. “I think if you ask different members 
of Good News, you’d get slightly different 
answers. I mean, ultimately we’re united 
around the Good News. We want to tell peo-
ple that are Christian or people that are not 
Christian that Jesus died so that they could 
be forgiven.”
“It’s a prayer set to a tune,” Mori explained. 
“It’s worship set to a tune.”
Music for prayer is nothing new.
“Gregorian chant is like the first a cap-
pella,” Thompson said, “There are reasons 
they would sing instead of speak everything. 
There’s a long history in Christianity of 
using music to express prayer. It’s thousands 
of years old — we’re just adapting it to the 
times.”
To prepare for their performances, they 
spend the first hour and a half of rehearsals 
singing. The last 30 minutes are devoted to 
fellowship.
This can take on a variety of different 
forms. Sometimes members of Good News 
meet in a stairwell in the Modern Languages 
Building to sing and worship. Other times it’s 
bible study, games, prayer or announcements.
“You meet people who are passionate 
about music and who are passionate about 
God,” Thompson said. “You get these situ-
ations where everybody is definitely differ-
ent people but we’re able to unite. We’re not 
just uniting in the way that a lot of choirs do, 
where you’re uniting because you’ve got to 
make this music sound good. We’re united in 
our faith, ultimately.”
A

s someone who doesn’t take part in 
organized religion, my discussion 
with Mori and Thompson gave rise 
to questions I knew they probably couldn’t 

answer. I wondered, in the way I think all 
agnostics and atheists do: How are you so 
certain? Do you ever have doubts? But these 
didn’t feel like questions I could ask them. I 
was there to learn about Good News, not to 
interrogate the basis and tenacity of their 
faith.
The closest we came to discussing the 
experience of belief — the actual physical 
feeling of piety — was when they talked about 
singing. They told me about the overwhelm-
ing sense of peace and harmony they felt, 
strong enough to break through stage fright. 
About performing a solo, surrounded by their 
friends, their brothers and sisters in Christ.
This, at least, felt as though it shared a 
boundary with something I could under-
stand. It reminded me of something I learned 
about two years ago in a class whose material 
mostly escapes me now.
I took Sociology 100 my freshman year. 
The class blurs together with the rest of first 
semester: milk stained with dining hall cere-
al, the bridge to the Hill, long evenings lost in 
the strange rush of explaining my whole life 
to new friends. But one concrete lesson I have 
not forgotten from Sociology is something 
LSA lecturer Terence McGinn told us about 
concerts. Bear with me. I promise this con-
nects to Christian a cappella.
A few years ago, McGinn had a student 
who wrote an honors thesis about the sociol-
ogy of concerts. The student was interested 
in the experience of euphoric connection that 
many concert-goers report feeling. I found 
the thesis online. It begins with the author, 
Jeffrey May, LSA ‘10 and current Michigan 
Law student, describing his own powerful 
sense of ecstasy during a cover of the Talking 
Heads song “This Must Be the Place” by The 
String Cheese Incident.
I confess that I was already intrigued. I 
love “This Must Be the Place.” A few months 
ago, some Saturday night when it was still 
warm out, my friends and I sang it together 
as we walked home. We were on the corner 
of Washtenaw Avenue and South Univer-
sity Avenue, waiting to cross the street, and 
I remember how that moment made me feel 
more deeply what I’ve always sort of known 
to be true: that the chimerical promise of 
whatever is next will always be eclipsed by 
the hugeness of our anticipation. The mem-
ory of the stuff we were waiting for will fade, 
and what remains is everything else: dancing 
in someone’s living room while the sun sets, 
the quiet walk home.

BY MIRIAM FRANCISCO, COPY CHIEF

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL

See THE PLACE, Page 6B

This must be 
the place

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